By Scott Tibbs, April 15, 2007
Earlier this week, Democrat candidate for President Barak Obama pledged to never again appear on the Don Imus program after Imus called the women's basketball team at Rutgers "nappy headed hos". Obama said: "It was a degrading comment. It's one that I'm not interested in supporting."
Really?
Apparently Obama does not know that Imus has a history of making racist comments, and had been doing so long before Obama ever appeared on Imus in the Morning. (See articles here, here and here.) In fact, previous comments by Imus about blacks and women were worse than what he said about the Rutgers women's team. It is more likely, however, that Obama knew full well about what Imus has said over the years and is simply a hypocrite.
Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton also jumped into the fray by sending a message to her e-mail list saying the comments by Imus were "small-minded bigotry and coarse sexism" and "showed a disregard for basic decency and were disrespectful and degrading". She encouraged her e-mail list to go to her Web site to send the team "a message of respect and support".
Is this the woman who wants to be the leader of the free world? I expect a candidate for President to be a lot more serious than Hillary Clinton showed herself to be this week. Clinton's whining and crying was extremely un-presidential. Given that Imus has attacked Clinton in the past (something that Clinton brought up this week), I suspect that her denouncement of Imus is motivated by a personal vendetta rather than a true concern for a women's basketball team.
There's no question in my mind that what Imus said was highly inappropriate, but the Rutgers women's basketball team and their defenders have oversold this to a laughable extreme. One player said "I think that this has scarred me for life." Another player said this regarding the team's run in the NCAA tournament: "We were stripped of this moment by a degrading comment by Mr. Imus."
Oh, come on! Can we turn up the hyperbole dial a little more here? Scarred for life? Stripped of the ability to enjoy athletic success? Give me a break.
I really don't care about Don Imus, and it does not bother me that both MSNBC and CBS radio have dropped his program. What bothers me is the larger principle at stake here. There is a dark and sinister agenda behind the attack on Imus, which Al Sharpton revealed when he promised to complain to the FCC about Imus.
The issue at stake here is not whether a radio talk show host should have lost his job. The issue is the agenda of some extreme Leftists to use the force of government to silence those who disagree with them. What the Left is doing here is laying the groundwork for a campaign to get the FCC to censor on-air opinions that Leftists do not like. This agenda is not just wrong, it is treasonous and must be stopped.
